At the Advance HE Surveys and Insights Conference 2021, Alan Donnelly and Caroline Heaton led a workshop that was based on their work of applying cognitive interviewing techniques to examine students’ interpretations of, and responses to, items in the development of the Module Evaluation Questionnaire used at Sheffield Hallam University. Cognitive interviewing refers to a set of techniques used to assess the ways in which individuals mentally respond to survey questions.
A project at Sheffield Hallam aimed to conduct cognitive interviews with students as part of the development of a questionnaire to evaluate teaching and learning. This blog post will complement existing recommendations on ‘Doing fieldwork in a pandemic’ (e.g. Lupton, 2020) by considering whether technology can be utilised as a viable alternative to in-person participation for conducting cognitive interviews, such as by using phones and web-based video conferencing.